15 Now/Seattle Activists at an April demonstration demanding a $15-per-hour minimum wage in Seattle. This article is originally appeared in the December 7, 2014, edition of the Los Angeles Times . We republish it here as part of " American Labor at a Crossroads: New Thinking, New Organizing, New Strategies ," a conference to be presented on January 15, co-sponsored by the Albert Shanker Institute, The Sidney Hillman Foundation, and The American Prospect . (View agenda here .) Find our Labor at a Crossroads series here . H altingly, with understandable ambivalence, the American labor movement is morphing into something new. Its most prominent organizing campaigns of recent years—of fast-food workers, domestics, taxi drivers and Wal-Mart employees—have prompted states and cities to raise their minimum wage and create more worker-friendly regulations. But what these campaigns haven't done is create more than a small number of new dues-paying union members. Nor, for the foreseeable future...

(Sipa via AP Images) Supporters of Greece's main opposition leader, Alexis Tsipras from the left-wing Syriza party, during a pre-election rally in central Athens on May 22, 2014. This article originally appeared in the Washington Post . A New Left is rising in Europe as the new year begins. And despite the fears it engenders in polite society, this New Left is less Marxian than it is—oh, the horror—Keynesian. Keynesianism is a complex economic theory, but its central insight is simple enough: If every institution stops spending, economic activity will decline. Self-evident though this may be, this insight has eluded such global economic institutions as the International Monetary Fund, as well as Europe’s economic hegemon, Germany, when dealing with the depression that has devastated southern Europe, and Greece in particular. In confronting the economic crisis that began with the 2008 implosion of Wall Street, nations such as Greece and Spain were unable to bolster their economies by...

(Protest: Esther Yu-Hsi Lee for ThinkProgress)/Obama: Official White House Photo by Pete Souza)

(Esther Yu-Hsi Lee for ThinkProgress) Demonstrators at a protest on the national Mall in Washington, D.C., on October 8, 2013. This essay originally appeared on the op-ed page of The Washington Post , where the author has a column. T he commemorations of the 25th anniversary of the Berlin Wall’s fall have thrust into the public spotlight the border guard who ordered the gates opened. The subject of both a new German-language book and film, one-time Stasi Lt. Col. Harald Jäger has recounted why he defied his orders. And his story couldn’t be more relevant to the debate consuming our own nation. On the evening of Nov. 9, 1989, prompted by an erroneous announcement from an East German Politburo spokesman that his compatriots would be free to cross the border, thousands of East Berliners flocked to the checkpoint Jäger supervised. His superiors told him to keep the gates closed, though he could let a few people through, provided he marked the passports of those he determined were...

(AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite) Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, joined by his wife, former Labor Secretary Elaine Chao, celebrates with his supporters at an election night party in Louisville,Tuesday, November 4, 2014. McConnell won a sixth term in Washington, with his eyes on the larger prize of GOP control of the Senate. The Kentucky Senate race, with McConnell, a 30-year incumbent, fighting off a spirited challenge from Democrat Alison Lundergan Grimes, has been among the most combative and closely watched contests that could determine the balance of power in Congress. D emocrats had ample reason to fear that this year’s midterm elections would not go well for them, but bad doesn’t begin to describe what happened to them—and the nation—yesterday. Catastrophic is more like it. Democrats didn’t just lose the Senate; they lost statehouse after statehouse. They didn’t just lose the red states; they lost the purple and the blue. They lost the governorships of Maryland...